it's not even a social networking protocol, it's literally just a networking protocol for the reasons you laid out.

And of course all the dynamics you talk about emerge naturally. With scale comes concentration and hierarchies out of necessity, the power to blocklist 'relays' across the largest instances, etc.

All these experiments basically are a venture in rediscovering economics and politics. The internet started out decentralized. Reinventing html and web servers isn't changing anything.